AboutWelcome to Free Software Daily (FSD). FSD is a hub for news and articles by and for the free and open source community. FSD is a community driven site where members of the community submit and vote for the stories that they think are important and interesting to them. Click the "About" link to read more...

Published - Legal

Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs.

On Saturday October 1st, eight countries (the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea) signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Tokyo, Japan.

ACTA will lead to a situation where the decision of whether a given content and its use are legal or not is no longer in the hands of a judge, but falls under an automated censorship regime programmed by private parties. As a result, fair use and the right to a fair trial will be crushed.

This platform, RespectMyNet.eu, will present EU lawmakers with the evidence they keep denying: there is an urgent need to legislate against Net Neutrality violations, which harm fundamental freedoms as well as innovation and competition.